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RedditAt 5-foot-1 and 110 pounds, Mayda del Valle may be petite, but she has the stage presence of a gargantua. At a recent music, dance and spoken-word event called "Race, Rap and Redemption," the 28-year-old poet commands the University of Southern California's Bovard Auditorium with her thunderous voice and agile moves. Clad in a denim miniskirt and black knee-high boots, Del Valle gyrates and gestures, infusing her cadences with Broadway charisma. This is her bully pulpit.
"Spanglish slips off my lips," she spits in "Tongue Tactics," a poem about her Puerto Rican-flavored speech.
And I'm speaking in tongues
Blending proper with street talk
Everyday meets academic
Bastardizing one language
Creating new ones.
Del Valle is doing something many poets can only dream of—making a living at it. Forget about Wordsworth's notion of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility."
She prowls the stage like a rapper—more Mos Def than Maya Angelou.
Del Valle is one of the nine original hip-hop poets who form the cast of HBO's "Def Poetry," now in its sixth season. The show went to Broadway in 2002 and promptly won a Tony Award in 2003 for Special Theatrical Event. In 2004, she was among a small group of spoken-word artists invited to tour the country with an original copy of the Declaration of Independence as part of a nonpartisan voter drive called "Declare Yourself."
"Spoken word is our democracy," says Norman Lear, the TV producer ("All in the Family") and civic activist who created the program, and who calls Del Valle one of his favorite people. "All of those voices from across all ethnicities and religions and races and ages—it's our democracy writ large in poetry."
Del Valle, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles' Koreatown, likens herself to a traditional West African griot, or storyteller. "If you go back historically and you look at the griots, they didn't just record the history of people or tell people what was going on," she says. "They set the vision for where society should be."
Comments
How ccan I get Maya's email, or contact information. I would like her to be a speaker at a women's empowerment conference.
Posted by caroline on January 10,2008 | 11:33AM
Mayda Del Valle, will you marry me? Just kidding... i'm doing a presentation on you for one of my classes and i am so proud that the latino community is making it in the theater and film realm finally. keep on rocking! HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!
Posted by Salvador on May 8,2008 | 05:32PM
Maya, I would love to get in touch with you to see if you can inspire my students at Reid Continuation HS in Long Beach. We are doing a poetry unit and I came across your work while researching for more meaningful poetry. Would you contact me please! Blessings! Peace, EOB of the LBC Mrs. Bolla English Teacher
Posted by elizabeth bolla on May 16,2008 | 01:04PM
Wow, she sounds so inspirational! A "mighty mouth" indeed! Que viva la raza ey!!
Posted by Kristina Salgado on February 10,2009 | 08:14PM
That is amazing and goes to show that you dont have to be skinny and tall or normal sized to be talented and it also goes to show that people come in all shapes and sizes and they have talent reguardless.
Posted by Samantha on September 14,2009 | 02:28PM